The impact of 'thirsty' data centres
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2025
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We're in the US state of Georgia, where huge data centres need water to keep cool.
But how is this need for cloud storage and AI capability affecting local residents and the environment?
Presenter: Michelle Fleury Producer: Nathalie Jimenez
(Image: Georgia resident Beverly Morris looks at sediment build up in her toilet, which she says makes it impossible to flush. Instead she has to pour through a bucket of water)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Business Daily on the BBC. |
| 0:04.0 | I'm Michelle Flurry. |
| 0:05.7 | We don't think about the cloud until it stops working, |
| 0:08.7 | but what if the real issue isn't online? |
| 0:11.4 | I can't live in my home with half of my home functioning |
| 0:16.1 | and no water and I can't drink the water. |
| 0:19.8 | This is a story about the hidden infrastructure of our digital lives, data centers. |
| 0:25.5 | Anything that you do today on your computer, your mobile devices, the apps you use, |
| 0:31.2 | they're mostly powered by data centers. |
| 0:34.0 | But the future, it turns out, needs a whole lot of water, |
| 0:39.1 | and small towns across America, |
| 0:40.9 | they're feeding it first. |
| 0:48.4 | You don't want to wait until there's an economic disaster, meaning power supply, water supply, |
| 0:51.5 | and to do something about it. |
| 0:54.1 | Tech companies say they've heard the message. |
| 0:59.5 | Our goal is that by 2030, we will be putting more water back into the watersheds and communities where we're operating data centers than we're taking out. |
| 1:02.3 | So what exactly is a data center? |
| 1:05.0 | And why are they suddenly eating small-town America for breakfast? |
| 1:08.6 | That's coming up on Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 1:14.8 | March 25th, International Data Center Day, which I didn't make up, but also didn't know existed. |
| 1:22.9 | Maybe I should have. |
| 1:24.9 | The data center story is not slowing down. |
... |
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